September 2021

Sometimes I think if Jon and Martin ended up somewhere else, Jon would be so good at helping people who are afraid. 

He’s been through so much fear (I hardly even need to say it) and he was the Archive of fear. He knows fear like hardly anyone else does, even without the Beholding helping him. 

And him using that knowledge to help and comfort others would just be so good. And in a world where the Fears don’t exist and you can actually conquer fear because fear is only human and not supernatural…it would just be so good. 

Edit, I guess: I want to write this now. I mean, really, I want to read this, but I may have to write it myself. 

*grabs computer* I’ll do it myself. 

Jon: “I can see the edges of reality”

Me: What does that mean, though? I’m imagining old MInecraft where the world’s not infinite and you just hit a wall and the world stops??? Is that what he sees? Just an invisible, egg-shaped wall? Wait, no, it’s a multiverse. Is there some Yggdrasil or web of universes he sees, and then that’s encased in a boundary? Does that mean the universes are contained in a larger universe? If the multiverse has edges it must be an enclosed space. Are we in a box? Did Jon see out of Plato’s cave?

I can’t tell if this is rhetorical or not. I think it is. 

The coincidence that the Magnus Institute was founded the same year as Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein gets weirder when you realize that it’s a book with the lesson of 1. don’t mess with the natural order of things and 2. if you do, take some responsibility for it and Jonah founded the Institute to mess with the natural order of things by starting the apocalypse and tried to make Jon feel guilty about it. 

Okay, so you know how most of the archive crew is named after famous horror writers? Most obviously Tim from Bram Stoker and Melanie from Stephen King (which it took me forever to notice)? 

I bet at least, like, Jon noticed this, Jon having read all the horror books there are to try and explain Mr. Spider. So how did that go down? 

Jon: Have you seen that statement about vampires anywhere? 

Tim: Oh, yeah, I was reading it because I thought it was funny that my name’s Stoker like Bram Stoker. (I know this is forced, go with it)

Jon: Ah. Yes. I’ve noticed these odd…coincidences…with your names before. Algernon Blackwood and M. R. James wrote ghost stories. 

Sasha: What about you? 

Jon: I am not aware of any horror writer with the last name Sims.  (I just realized this is funnier since Jonny has now become a horror writer with the release of Thirteen Storeys. So, now there is a horror writer with the last name Sims.) I can only assume I’m the main character because of this. 

Sasha: …what? 

Jon: Never mind. 

Martin: Huh. Should we be worried that we work in this spooky—sorry, Jon—place, reading horrifying statements, and we are mostly named after horror writers? 

Jon: …no. Surely not. 

Melanie King, Georgie Barker: *make statements*

Jon: This is…starting to become a disturbing trend. 

Why are there so many explicit fics involving Jon Sims, who canonically is ace and “just…doesn’t” have sex? 

I can’t tell if this is on the side of “you do you” or something worse?

Like, I know that ace people can enjoy sex (although that quote implies that Jon doesn’t want to have sex). I know that fanfiction is very much a “you do you, that’s great” type of thing. (If I don’t like it, I can just not read it. I know.) 

On the other hand, Jon is implied to not want to have sex. He’s asexual and sex-neutral or sex-repulsed (tell me if I got that part wrong). I’m also ace and either of those things. It seems weird to me that there’s explicit fic with him in it. (Although of course explicit stuff is a ‘nope’ for me in general, so.) Is it kind of erasing him being ace to do that? 

So I don’t know. 

Edit: I did look on ao3 to see how many it was, and I suppose about 1000 out of almost 17000 isn’t really ‘so many’. But it still feels like too many? I don’t know.